Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City UK Review

Because there's certainly nothing new to see here...

About three hours ago, it started snowing in Fumble. With it, and the sudden climatic shift, came an influx of bizarre new aquatic species destined for adventures as prize museum exhibits or as Fumble's chief export alongside apples and seashells. If that doesn't sound like the singularly most charming thing you've ever heard in your life, then it's conceivable that you're a) not a horse faced girl in a bad TV advertisement or b) not very much going to like Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City.

Of course, if that all seems curiously familiar, that's because Let's Go to the City takes all the best bits of previous Animal Crossing games on DS and GameCube and promptly proceeds to do absolutely nothing with them. If you've ever played a previous Animal Crossing game, you already know exactly what you're getting with Let's Go to the City – and when we say exactly, we mean it in precisely the sense that you know exactly what to expect if you ask a giant to kick you in the balls.

Four players can share one game but it's still lonely without online.

It's a life simulation – for want of a better phrase – that takes all those depressingly mundane aspects of real-life, multiplies them with infinite abandon, plonks them in a rustic setting and then has the audacity to call itself a game. It's also, bizarrely, one of the most fiercely addictive, ferociously compelling games ever devised and one that is literally guaranteed to eat away your very life force if you submit to its charms. You're given a home, a crippling mortgage and then told to make your own way in the world of self-efficiency, earning bells through menial labour – from fishing to fruit picking – in order to increase your property capital, perhaps with a sizeable extension, comfortable rug or pink flamingo in the living room. As ever, it's the real-time clock that keeps the world ticking over, bringing with it new faces, new fashions, new furniture, new seasons and more. It's the meticulous drip-feed of content that keeps you playing long after your sanity's ebbed away and your shiny new kiwi shirt is the only nod to personal hygiene as you wallow in your real-world filth.

Watching your village change as seasons shift is mesmerising.

Indeed, Animal Crossing is Nintendo's most cynically exploitative, remorselessly manipulative title to date, assuming you don't count the time it permanently scarred a nation of seven-year old girls by threatening to kill their puppies if they turned off their DS. Manipulative it might be but, as the series' popularity has ably demonstrated, there's no finer driving force than capitalist greed and Let's Go to the City slithers you into its insidious grip with alarming ease.

That's in part due to the game's understated presentation, all pastel hues, idyllic allusions and sedentary pace – each aspect working in meticulously-constructed harmony to mask what's a brutally regimental game structure. It's a product that's wholly designed to carry you forward on a wave of empty promises and blind faith, where the ticking of the clock and the change of seasons isn't so much an indication of progression as an insurmountable barrier to whatever arbitrary goal you've set in a bid to eke reward from your mundane virtual existence – be that a set of matching chairs or a hat that looks like a testicle.